UC Berkeley

The responses of biological systems to perturbations can depend on past events, a phenomenon known as historical contingency. The fitness of a new species in a community, or of a new mutation in a genome, is always evaluated within the existing context. Identifying historical processes in ecology and evolution has been challenging, as it requires a detailed record of past events. Further, historical contingency can make each instance of community assembly or each mutational sequence appear unique, and potentially not useful for building predictive frameworks. However, a growing body of work reveals that we can, in fact, identify conditions that alter the balance of historical and deterministic processes across systems, and that this understanding can help us interpret puzzling patterns of divergence among populations or communities. My dissertation research explores historical contingency in the ecology and evolution of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, and phages. I focus on microbes as a tractable model system for other organisms, an interesting case study when patterns do not align with those of other organisms, and an important component of ecosystems in their own right.